Everyone is mocking this CEO-led rebrand. It isn’t a tragic failure, but the process might be.

In describing the new Yahoo! logo that launched today, CEO Marissa Mayer said it is based on “a sans serif font with scallops”. That font is Optima. The ‘O’s come straight from Herman Zapf’s typeface, while the other letters are derived from it. Setting aside the question of whether Optima is a good choice for an internet company that wants to be perceived as forward-looking, let’s just take a look at how they used the type.

The logo designers lowered the crossbars on the ‘H’ and ‘A’, and altered the contrast, making all diagonal strokes the same width. (Symmetry is often an undeniable urge in logotype design.) The result of this lettershape mirroring, other than the fact that the typographic styles are incongruent, is that the new monolinear ‘Y’ is heavier and out of sync with the rest of the letters.

The typorati has already made variouscomplaintsaboutthelogo, but what distracts me most is how crammed these letters are — and unevenly so. Looking at each of the pairs (‘AH’, ‘HO’, ‘OO’), it’s clear that the designers considered only the extremes of each letter and inserted a mathematically equal space between those extremes, ignoring the holistic space around each letter. It’s a classic mistake made by those who are new to working with type.

For the comparison below, I set the word “YAHOO!” in Optima with the spacing more-or-less as I would have applied it. Kerning (the space between a pair of two specific letters) is subjective, so we could quibble about exact values for each of these pairs, but there is no doubt the tracking should be looser overall. The tighter the letterspacing, the more obvious the inconsistencies become. Making matters worse are the huge interiors of those ‘O’s, inevitably at odds with the cramped spaces around them. Most importantly, logos are usually seen at sizes much smaller than you see them here, further exacerbating the problems of tight spacing.

Taking a step back, the new logo isn’t a tragic failure (not as much as its rationalization, anyway), but some of the decisions made here are quite typical of those cases in which experienced lettering artists or type designers were not involved.

The official Yahoo! logo. The tracking is very tight and the kerning in “AHOO” only acknowledges the extreme edge of each letter, leading to uneven spacing throughout.

Matt, my setting isn’t intended to be a logo, it’s just an example of how I would have spaced the word in Optima.

Robsays:

Sep 5th, 2013 6:57 pm

EditIf memory serves, I also think Mayer said that none of the characters had straight lines. She was basically being as descriptive about the font as possible without explicitly stating that the font is a modification of Optima. For someone who claims to appreciate things like typography as much as she does, it’d have been nice if she’d mentioned the font or Zapf.

I didn’t expect attribution, Rob. While it would certainly be commendable, logo designers rarely credit the source typeface for their work. But I do hope the Yahoo folks don’t really mean what was reported in Advertising Age today:

Proprietary Font

The new typeface is one unique to Yahoo. “We always knew that we wanted to develop our own proprietary font, and that this would be intellectual property that would come from Yahoo, from our design team,” Ms. Savitt said. And so they did (though Yahoo’s new font doesn’t yet have its own name).

Perhaps there is some miscommunication here and there is no real “typeface”, just the custom lettering for the logo. If there is indeed a complete font in addition to this design, we’ll have to brace ourselves for more bad type.

In the intro typography course I teach, I have students do letter spacing exercises all semester long, always referring back to Jan Tschichold’s “The Use of Capitals”, from Treasury of Alphabets and Lettering. “YAHOO” is a great (and timely) example of a difficult “word image”. I love what you wrote about “huge interiors of those ‘O’s, inevitably at odds with the cramped spaces around them”. It recalls Tschichold’s line, “As long as the circular O is placed rather closely to other letters, its white inner circle cuts a perceivable hole into the line.”

When I first saw the new logo, I immediately asked myself, “What would Tschichold say?”

Nothing much to say about the bezel, other than it doesn’t help. My guess is that it was tossed on near the end to add interest. It’s not a surprising affectation given the current retro fad of faceted and chromatic type styles. This bit from Mayer’s justification is just silly — on the same plane as the mathematical grid/diagram nonsense.

the thin horizontals of those giant Os.

Yes, the hairlines do get lost. It could help to start with a heavier weight of Optima, but that wouldn’t fix the dissonance of styles caused by deleting the contrast in the ‘Y’ and ‘A’.

BTW, perhaps that “SPORTS” line is set in the “custom typeface” mentioned in the Ad Age story linked above.

I think your post is missing the point — the kerning is supposed to be awkward to the point of “playful” so that the word seems to bend inward and the last ‘OO’ projects forward to jump out of the page. I find it kind of Disney-esque.

I think the bevel is the weak (crass) point. Such photoshop effects are still too new, too shudder-inspiring, in my mind to start being incorporated, even as a homage to the ’90s (’90s grunge music and clothing may be in but photoshop effects need to wait a little longer before they can be cool).

This post reminds me of the comments on Apple’s iOS 7 icon guidelines — something new, to the point of seemingly awkward, and the design community missing the point. I do, however, hold iOS 7 icon grids in higher regard than this new logo.

When this logo popped up on my screen, it was like a punch in the face. Yahoo!, how could you do this to yourself?

This new logo seems to me truly amateurish. It represents the kind of clueless typography I often see in real-estate or home-improvement ads in junk-mail shoppers. Those kinds of printed communication vehicles are usually produced by the lowest bidder, and quality is sacrificed for low production cost. But, for heaven’s sake, Yahoo!, this is your new business image. Spend the money to hire someone who knows something about typography.

The beveled type is so faint that it will fall apart in almost all uses. I must at least give Yahoo credit, however, for not adding a drop-shadow, vignetting or some other bad-Photoshop artifact.

This logo now joins my Hall of Shame, along with the short-lived Helvetica Gap logo and the new American Airlines (formerly Greyhound Bus) logo.

Other than all the correct comments posted already and in the article, what I think was lost is the “shouting” cadence of the original logo.

It always appeared to me like extracted from a comic book where a newspaper boy was announcing “War!” (I’m not saying that this was good, just what I feel.)

The redesign “carries on” some of the “distortion” in the letters but sterilized any possible meaning or representation. It seems to me more like a defect, if you do not know the previous design.

RGsays:

Sep 6th, 2013 2:22 am

EditIt seems misguided to criticize this design at a formal typographical level when the logic of its construction is so clearly operating at the iconic level of “word as image”, with the compressions and expansions of font size and spacing visually representing the timing and volume dynamics of the performed speech act… a yodel, depicted in the typographical conventions of a cartoon.

I agree with Ivan. It’s also bad typography because it won’t scale well. Picture this logo reduced down to a couple of picas or enlarged to several feet wide. It either disappears or picket-fences into hash. This is junior-league design work.

I’m not a bevel expert, but why is it that the ‘A’ and the exclamation point are the only shadows that arn’t to the left. I guess you could argue that its more realistic and changes up the repetition, but i don’t know I would have preffered it all left.

Non-designer here. I was really curious about Mayer’s geometric proofs and mathematical justifications behind the new logo. Is this stuff really part of a standard design process or just some strange obsession (as it appears to me)? I am not seeing what any of it accomplishes.

Nobody have said a word about those poor employees forced to work on a weekend. No doubt the product looks like a quick hack: they were on a hurry to finish it and go hanging with their family and friends.

I agree with pretty much all of what’s been said. And yet despite all the post-rationalization given for the design, I am truly baffled by the choice of Optima as a starting point for a couple of reasons. The first being it is incredibly reminiscent of a past period in time, which for a technology company, seems so misguided. Secondly, as some have alluded to, with its onomatopoeia, the word Yahoo! is literally crying out (exclamation!) for a more forceful and impactful typeface, and they decided on something so understated. To me, part of Optima’s indelible heritage is its usage on the Vietnam Memorial. Given that context you’d think the designers would have shied away. Perhaps they didn’t know any better? Or maybe as a dying company, a typeface for a memorial is in fact, very fitting.

Gabriel Bersonsays:

Sep 6th, 2013 4:10 pm

EditFor more insight into the design process here, I refer you back to the Google logo. Marissa Meyer was in charge of Google’s search page for years, which (when not occupied by a doodle) has at its center an especially hideous logo with an out of proportion capital G. The Google logo has the same amateurish feel to me, with its misshapen type and multiple colors.

What if this is more of the same publicity stunt that ran through the last month, playing with refjected logotypes. Sort of a New Coke stunt to generate all this ridiculous buzz far above what is deserved.

While at small sizes (whereas the clumsy bevel is barely noticeable) the new logo at least seems more modern than the previous Bazooka Joe-inspired version, but they’re a big company whose audience won’t raise any issue with a PowerPoint object as a logo. It almost seems pointless to scrutinize it because there would be no discussion if this exact logo were that of some two-bit fax machine repair shop in the middle of Wisconsin.

Is it a piece of crap that looks like clip art? Yes. Will anyone care besides designers? No.

Believe me, I agree that it’s painful, and that proprietary font business they’re pushing is weak (Optihoo!?) but… have you seen their Angelfire-inspired web site? Fits right in.

With all due respect, a wordmark meant to communicate “word as image” does not disqualify the fact that it’s poorly typeset. Since it’s a logotype rather then an illustration it ought to comply with typographic rules. It appears to be composed by someone with very poor typographic skills.

Many have said it, and I’ll repeat it because I think it’s imporant; it’s not the design and how it looks that should get all of the critique, but more the process and the way they went about it… Designing a logo for a 10 billion dollar company is something you don’t do in a “weekend”… Even if you could… I don’t know any agency or designer that would hear a claim like that and not shake his/her head…

It’s like going backwards. It feels like a non-designer owner of a start up company designed his own logo. So sad! The old logo may have needed a re-design but it had far too much character than the new one. And no! You can’t mix Optima with fun or whimsical.

Blake, see my comment above. It is a custom typeface, and a pretty sad one at that. I assume it was optimized for the very small sizes at which the logos usually appear, but even then it is really wonky — not in a good way. Similar ideas are in Cosmos or URW Imperial. Comparing these professional faces to the logotypes, you can quickly see where the Yahoo face goes awry.